I think Apple's CPU choice is clear cut. Strange as it sounds, the Xeon 5100 series is the best fit for the Mac. If Apple wants to keep the Quad name alive, it's the only option. Dual CPU configurations are not possible with anything else in Intel land, so if Apple wants to offer two CPUs and four cores, Xeon is the only game in town. With the benchmarks we have seen, the Core 2 Duo is a clear winner for Intel, outperforming anything AMD has to offer. The Xeon? With its faster FSB and different memory, it's even faster than the Core 2 Duo."

I don't think anybody believes Apple intends windows to be the primary OS on their hardware. However, it does make for an interesting comparison when windows and windows apps run faster on a Mac than a PC.

What will be most interesting is what Leopard has in store in the way of windows compatiblity. Some think Bootcamp functionality will no longer require a reboot.

I'm pretty sure Parallels runs using a hypervisor too, IIRC. It's not Mac virtualizing a Windows platform, it's Parallels virtualizing both Mac and Windows. The Mac acts as a host operating system, and Windows as a guest but only in appearance, because Apple won't allow OS X to boot on anything else besides TPM. If Apple would allow booting OS X outside of TPM in some circumstances(which is probably never going to happen) you could conceivably do it the other way around - run Mac as a guest OS to Windows. Is there a Virtual Machine that makes the guest OS think it's running inside a trusted platform? I'm not sure about the specifics.

I could definitely see Mac supporting Windows inside a built-in "Classic"-type virtualization environment and integrating with the OS, so that double-clicking on an exe file in the Mac would launch it in Windows. I could even see them doing that in "rootless" mode like they did with Classic when they first made the transition to OS X - run Windows applications as though they were running on OS X directly - they draw regular Aqua windows instead of Windows Windows, can be switched to from the Dock, and have the same background as other OS X applications (although Classic still head a lot of the appearance of Mac OS 9).

Some people have suggested reproducing the Windows API inside of Mac OS X, since Apple has been given access to the entire Windows API but I think that would run counter to Apple's commitment to comparmentalizing different APIs inside of different protected memory stacks, so that a crash inside a Windows application doesn't take down the whole host OS with it. While reproducing the Windows API doesn't preclude the possibility of running it on top of OS X, instead of parallel to it, it's not worth the effort when an instance of Windows itself can already run on top of OS X. I also don't think that would be better than virtualizing Windows, since a hack could easily make Windows run applications in rootless mode inside the OS X graphical environment . Then they could advertise that Mac OS X now runs Windows programs just as well as it runs Mac programs - even though really it would be Windows running Windows programs on top of Mac programs.

Here. Have a sip of this kool aide, then tell me what you think. No? You're not feeling it? Step over here, then. Over here, next to this portable reality distortion field. It runs off of Steve Job's urine. Pretty amazing, huh? Now. Are you ready to admit that an Apple computer, with the exact same specs and components as another brand machine, is faster? Way faster? Just nod your head.

All sarcasm aside, I think that an Apple computer running Windows will appear to run faster than a similarly configured Dell or HP running Windows because the Apple computer doesn't start up with all the extra "support/bonus" software that Dell and HP dump onto their computers before they ship it out to the customer. Also, let us forget the fact that Apple Computers don't ship with Windows, i.e. *Clean Install* of Windows, which we all know runs faster than the 3-year old Win2K install running with spy/bloa

How do you come to that conclusion? Apple machines use the same chips and chipsets as their rivals. Therefore comparable models are going to perform with comparable results. The only thing I expect is faster is their time to market. They appear to be getting first cut on Intel chips, which gives them some edge on new machines until other makers catch up. For that you pay the Apple premium and still have to fork out for a Windows licence, if that was your intended OS in the first place.

The dogcow was the Clarus symbol way back in the day. It was some strange creature that looked like a cross between a dog and a cow.

Sacrificial entrails refers to pagan rituals involving killing an animal (generally a sheep or goat) and studying the entrails in some strange ritual that was supposed to provide information about the future.

It seems to me that Apple might as well hold off on releasing the Pro line until CS3... I've talked to a few designers, and they are all holding out for CS3 to make the upgrade, since they work so frequently in these applications, and they take a big performance hit on the new hardware.

If you spend all your time working in a few select apps, it clearly makes more sense to wait until those apps work well on the hardware. Doing otherwise is just foolishness. OTOH, Adobe won't get their shit together until there are machines out there for the CS apps to run on, so telling Apple to hold off releasing the pro machines until Adobe is ready doesn't make sense. Chicken-egg thing...

We already went through this just a few years ago with OS X. Apple would be STUPID to wait until CS3 comes out. Yes, designers squirmed for a year or two while they waited for all their apps to come out, but Apple managed to stay in business in the meantime, and by the time the apps came out, the OS was quite nice. Hell, the FINDER in OS X 10.0 sucked ass performance-wise; I can't imagine trying to run any real APPS with it. (I used 10.0 to play around with the UNIX side of OS X while I waited 9 months for 10.1 to appear. While 10.1 was out, all the apps were released, and then Apple came out with 10.2 and the whole package was finally very nice.)

Same thing this time: Apple will have new hardware out, and one day when the apps appear, users will be able to buy them and use them that day. Apple will continue to sell G5s, and designers will hoard them, just like they did with the last of the OS-9-booting MDD G4s. The switch to Intel is really no different. Doesn't matter if it's the OS or hardware changing, the effect on the applications is the same: the apps won't run in an ideal manner, so people will either wait to change, or get by with non-optimal systems, untill the apps match the system.

Besides, plenty of people buy nice Macs and don't use CS. Final Cut is already shipping for Intel and Apple's other pro apps will all be universal soon--maybe even coincident with the release of the hardware. I'd expect to see an announcement regarding that at the WWDC as well: "We at Apple have just finished our transition to Intel, and we've also transitioned all of our apps. Yay us!"

The biggest difference this time, actually, is with Adobe: since OS 9 came out, they purchased Macromedia, and Quark almost dead, so Adobe can drag their feet all they want for the Intel transition.* That's another big reason that Apple would be stupid to wait for Adobe to get a product out the door. (Besides, how would it look for Apple to be waiting on Adobe before releasing new hardware? Very weak, that's how.)

chicken and egg or not, the amount of time it took for quark to update quark express to work with mac os x meant alot of designers I knew who needed to use it stayed with mac os 9, as balmy as that sounds, it's sometimes a case.

The whole point of Dev Kits is so software can be ready for hardware when it comes out.

Although, I sometimes get the feeling that Apple has intentionally withheld information about the Intel switch from it's development partners to give Apple's own products an edge as far as having universal binaries is concerned.

I don't have any numbers of any kind to back this up, so take this with several large dollops of salt, but: I suspect that the number of creative pros who rely on Adobe tools is much, much higher than the number of those who rely on the Apple in-house tools.

And don't underestimate the capacity of design pros to drag their feet. For years, I knew graphic artists who refused to upgrade to OS X because Quark wouldn't run natively in it. Of course, when the new version of Quark finally was release, Adobe's answer was arguably much better.

Your suspicion is based on the erroneous assumption that all "creative pros" are people who work in graphic design, publishing, web design, etc.

Let's not forget that filmmakers are "creative pros" and a lot of them are using Final Cut Pro Studio and Shake. Musicians are "creative pros" and a lot of them are aready using UB versions of Garageband or Logic. Ableton Live is also already Universal Binary, and very widely used by laptop musicians and DJs.

In fact, a lot of musicians are even using Final Cut Pro Studio, because they loved Soundtrack Pro and their only option to upgrade was an attractively priced crossgrade offer to FCP Studio.

There are many professional creatives already working on Intel Macs to earn their daily bread.

So let's stop acting as if design pros are the only pros who are "creative". They didn't invent creativity, and judging by the current state of the majority of the web, they're not the final word in it either.

It's true. You can draw just fine under Rosetta, I do it all the time using my Wacom tablet.

The only thing that's pretty slow is moving layers around, applying filters, and blending effects. But that stuff doesn't need to be as real-time as actually drawing.

And as far as creative pros go, if in a given workweek I code some Java, some Lua, some XML, use Emacs and Eclipse, build a few web pages, draw some graphics, make a Flash toon, record some sound, and crank o

The 7.1 update is where intel mac support comes into play. Of course, the upgrade is only free if you're running 7.0 already. Its a $75 upgrade from 6.x to 7.0 though.

And yes, sound pros are not using garageband. And please, ableton and logic aren't exactly mainstays either... Logic is somewhat of a niche. ProTools is the industry standard, like it or not. And if you're talking about a runner-up, I'd say Cubase is way more widely used than Logic, especially n

On the other hand Quark lost market share by not moving to OS X in a timely manner. My wife's firm moved to InDesign when they upgraded to new OS X native machines back in the day. For every person who held out, another switched applications. Quark really dragged their feet on the conversion and I don't think Adobe will hold out as long on the move to UB, particularly if the hardware is selling well. People want the new hotness.

To stay on topic, I've always felt that Apple releases hardware and then developers create software to take full advantage of it. In short, hardware drives software development. It seems to differ slightly from the WinTel universe where hardware upgrades are often invoked by mew software. Admittedly, I have this perception because I always upgrade when new software runs dog slow on my PC. I don't seem to do that on my Mac as much, though the Intel move will probably hasten an upgrade from suddenly ancient G4.

On the other hand Quark lost market share by not moving to OS X in a timely manner. My wife's firm moved to InDesign when they upgraded to new OS X native machines back in the day. For every person who held out, another switched applications. Quark really dragged their feet on the conversion and I don't think Adobe will hold out as long on the move to UB, particularly if the hardware is selling well. People want the new hotness.

I don't have any numbers of any kind to back this up, so take this with several large dollops of salt, but: I suspect that the number of creative pros who rely on Adobe tools is much, much higher than the number of those who rely on the Apple in-house tools.

Apple and Adobe seem to have had a 'falling out' of sorts in the past few years, namely that Adobe's been relucatant to support Apple's latest and greatest technologies for the sake of preserving platform-compatibility with Windows. Adobe's becoming les

I think that future incarnations of Photoshop will be geared more toward retouching photos that have already been post-processed elsewhere. This is the one area where Photoshop has no competition, and it genuine excels in. Hopefully the rest of the 'cruft' will be taken out, and in the place of one giagantic monolithic application, we'll have several small applications tweaked and tuned for doing more specific tasks. By virtue of the fact that it will be easier for competetiors to compete with adobe on thes

I hear you...If you've got a PC around, you might give RawShooter [pixmantec.com] a try. Although it lacks much of the advanced retouching features of Photoshop, it's a great RAW Converter/Organization tool that works great for about 90% of the images I process (the other 10% requiring some sort of adjustment in Photoshop, because as you've said.... it does everything).

And unlike Adobe's products, RawShooter's multithreaded, which makes it fast and responsive on just about any hardware.

Apple and Adobe seem to have had a 'falling out' of sorts in the past few years, namely that Adobe's been relucatant to support Apple's latest and greatest technologies for the sake of preserving platform-compatibility with Windows. Adobe's becoming less and less relevant for mac users every year.

Quite true.

Video editing on the mac is pretty much entirely occupied by users of apple's pro stuff. In its price-range, Final Cut is easily the best video-editing solution out there. Adobe doesn't even suppor

4.1 is the end of the line for Shake. The huge price drop to $499 reflects that. All support contracts are being bought out and not renewed. Large customers have a source-escrow option available.

They are rumored to be starting work on a new compositing app which may or may not be shake-like, but which will certainly take some time to develop. Some of the shake support people have been laid off, but AFAIK the developers are moving over to the new shake-replacement project.

And they're working on a new version. Yeah, it may not be just a typical upgrade, but it's not being discontinued. I'm guessing it will be Intel only for the speed.

Listen to Dion's podcast, http://www.fxguide.com/article359.html [fxguide.com]. Shake as we know it will cease to exist. Support is already ending (note they're not transferring existing support contracts to this "shake replacement"). The new product (rumored to be called "phenomena") will be a "shake replacement" but nobody has any clue how shake-like it w

It seems to me that Apple might as well hold off on releasing the Pro line until CS3... I've talked to a few designers, and they are all holding out for CS3 to make the upgrade, since they work so frequently in these applications, and they take a big performance hit on the new hardware.

Whatever Apple or designers will be holding, I hope it won't be their breath. CS3 for Intel Mac is said to be out next years fall if they will feel lucky.

There are plenty of folks around who will buy the new pro machines who are using, say, Final Cut Pro, Motion, or Shake. A lot of high end 3d software is probably going to be announced jointly with any new pro machines (e.g. Maya, Lightwave; Blender [blender.org] just released an Intel binary). Unity [otee.dk] has been universal for a few months now.

I think Ars made wonderful points and a well informed prediction. However, though this article [frameworkx.com] is a few months old, I think that the principles behind it will still be in effect for Intel's upcoming lines, namely that a motherboard setup with a multi-core chip is in general cheaper than a roughly equivalently configured multi-chip one, and still for most applications the multi-core configuration will result in greater performance.

I don't recall anyone ever suggesting that Apple would use multiple single-core chips; Ars is only predicting that Apple will use the Xeon because it wants multiple dual-core chips (and single dual-core chips, to get better economies of scale).

I don't recall anyone ever suggesting that Apple would use multiple single-core chips; Ars is only predicting that Apple will use the Xeon because it wants multiple dual-core chips (and single dual-core chips, to get better economies of scale).

One wonders when the quad-core chips are coming out. AMD plans them for 2007. What about intel?

I think Ars made wonderful points and a well informed prediction. However, though this article is a few months old, I think that the principles behind it will still be in effect for Intel's upcoming lines, namely that a motherboard setup with a multi-core chip is in general cheaper than a roughly equivalently configured multi-chip one, and still for most applications the multi-core configuration will result in greater performance.

Yes, but here, I don't think there are any single-core chips in play. The de

What he was getting at is that intel is likely to release a quad-core chip to fill the role that the dual Xeons have filled. Therefore, as far as the apple linup goes, dual 2-core processors will be a very short lived technology depending on how long they wait to release thier pro line.

Right, therefore Apple's high end would move to dual quad-core chips. There will always be a place for multiple (physically separate) processors.

Unless it improves bandwidth somehow there's no benefit to multi-package as opposed to just having all the cores in a single package. For AMD of course, it would, since AMD's processors are utilize NUMA. Unless/until intel goes NUMA, there's no benefit to having multiple CPUs, just multiple cores. (Unless there's cache-space issues.)

The parent's post had nothing to do with single core chips. What he was getting at is that intel is likely to release a quad-core chip to fill the role that the dual Xeons have filled.

Well then, that's a problem, because methinks that Apple will release a new desktop before Intel releases a quad-core xeon. Therefore, for the time being, the one-chip vs. two-chip debate is irrelevant. Obviously they'll switch to a single chip when that's available but currently it's not.

What he was getting at is that intel is likely to release a quad-core chip to fill the role that the dual Xeons have filled

Yes they are. It's even on their Roadmap. Kentsfield is the quad core desktop chip and Clovertown is the quad core server chip. But they're not scheduled for release unti 1Q2007 and 4Q2006 respectively -- Apple would have to delay nearly 6 months if they want to go down that route. That's just silly when they can provide Xeon 5100 based systems now that will provide nearly the same leve

I don't understand your arguement. Apple currently ships a dual-processor workstation and each CPU has dual cores, referred to as the Quad G5. The article points out the obvious that the only way to duplicate this is with the Woodcrest Xeon parts since the Conroe is dual core, however it does not support more than a one CPU configuration. If Apple is to at least match and hopefully succeed the perceived and true power of their current offerings, they need a Quad core workstation as they offer now with the Quad G5. Two Woodcrest Xeon CPUs is the only way to achieve this goal with Intel's lineup. And the cheaper version will most likely mirror the G5 version as well, only sporting one Woodcrest Xeon with dual cores.

Apple is doing what is possible whith the chips that are available. And of course its a no brainer that as soon as a CPU with four cores or more is available from Intel, Apple will be looking for ways to get it in a Mac.

AMD advantage will come back with quad-core CPU as the Intel ones are the hack jobs of there first duel cores and with the Intel chip set NO SLI, NO Cross Fire apple will loss some of the high market on just that.

Amd Also has plans for Hyper Transport based cards and Co-processors that sound like the next thing to have in the high end market and people in it who are not into games may want to go for it.

Let's leave brand loyalism out of this. The whole purpose of capitalism is for this exact phenomenon to happen. The "underdog" company (AMD) came up with great products, people bought those products, the big bad corporation (Intel) got spooked and was forced to play harder to catch up. Result? The stunning results we're seeing from Conroe.

As long as we're moderately sure that Intel is playing fair and not leveraging their position to kick AMD out, I don't care who has the best processors

I'd have to guess being uniform. It's pretty obvious that they're going with the Intel route for everything else as the Core Duo is a decent chip (and the Core 2 chips are supposedly quite nice). Having their pro line be the black sheep might cause more headaches than they'd want: different motherboard, different chipset, different CPU, different drivers, etc. Might as well "go with what's working" for them.That being said, considering their already buying bulk from Intel, adding another line of chips to

Well, not quite.Apple's "Pro" stuff has always been quite a bit different.

For one, it took *forever* for the G5 to make its way from the PowerMac to the iMac (at which point, it stopped completely). The G5 was a radically different architecture from the G4, not to mention that Apple's been flip-flopping between IBM and Moterola for years. Apple, of all people, should have learned the lesson not to put all of its eggs in one basket after their falling out with IBM subsequent to Motorola exiting the market.

The article mentioned that Intel is doing flat rates to all manufacturers now... so I don't think buying more intel chips is going to get them any discount on the parts they're already ordering... (and the prices they charge HP, Dell, Apple,... are public information now)

An "Exclusive for X years" deal with Intel is the reason Apple can't use Opteron; the reason Apple won't use Opteron is because Intel provides the complete package of processor and chipsets, optimized for stability and performance. In order to use AMD processors, Apple would have to sign deals not just with AMD but also with ATI, or NVidia, or VIA, or another chipset maker.

And you're wrong, AMD no longer has the high-end edge. They won't regain it until 2008 at the earliest.

I'm guessing that apple will make their new lineup similar to their current one. A single dual-core for the low end(conroe), a faster single dual core for the midrange (conroe) and dual dual-core or the high end (woodcrest).

Apple desperately needs to update their powermac line; its embarassing when compared to any current PCs.

For $4 more, you get a faster processor, 4 times the memory, more harddrive space, dual optical drives, SLI, and a 20" LCD. Apple has done a good job of making sure that they add a lot of mac only accessories (or gimmicks depending on your point of view) that make direct comparisons to a PC harder. Stuff like backlit keyboards with light sensors, integrated webcam, frontrow, firewire, small formfactor, etc.

On a tower, things like expandibility, quiet operation, and size are pretty important and apples last workstation was fairly poor by that standard. The powermac looks nice, but 2 harddrive bays and 1 optical bay aren't going to cut it in such a large case.

Apple's brand is strong enough to command some premium, but they certainly are immune to market pressure and may need to realign their pricepoints. Mac minis need to start at $500, imacs at $1000, and Mac pros at $1500. Notebooks should start at $800 and $1500 respectively.

The XPS is a gaming rig. It looks great on specs but few companies will buy it. Companies who buy DELL for the sort of work done on macs typically buy the "Precision" line.However, it doesn't change much to your conclusion. A decent dual-core, dual cpu rig powermac G5 from Apple with 2GB of RAM, the Nvidia 7800 graphics card and a 20-inch monitor costs about 5k, whereas the similarly specced Dell Precision costs 3.5k. The difference is substantial.

While you do mention that Apple generally includes things that other manufactures do, I think you brush that off a bit too quickly. In the Apple computer that you mention here are a few of the things you forgot to mention:

Capacity of 16GB of memory. (the Dell maxes out at 8)The video card has a Dual-Link DVI capable of driving 30" displays. (not on the standard Dell, probably an option)Apple has two 4x PCI-Express slots and one 8x slot open. (the dell has one 1x and one 8x open.. but in fairness does have the space for SLI)The Apple has FireWire 800, which if you are doing video is a god-send. (not an option on the Dell... you just can't pump that data over the busses if it is not connected to the NorthBridge and expect to have decent performance)Optical audio in and out (probably an add-in option on the Dell... possibly third-party)

Go look at Dell's site for things that have those sorts of specs and you will be in the "Workstation" class products, and you will be looking at a large price jump.

And your summary judgement that the G5 is not as good as the Pentium D is very arguable. The two processors are in the same class as each other, to the point where saying either one of them is "faster" is misleading at best. You have to be very specific about what "faster" means in order to have an honest comparison. Anything else is simply a lie.

And as to the prices you say that Apple "has to" have. I think that Apple's continued existence over the last few decades means that they have a good idea what they "have to" do. And if you look at products that are comparable (and I challenge you to find a product that is comparable to the Mac mini... remember size is a real feature) I think that your illusions of Mac's being significantly more expensive disappear.

The mac mini comment is so valid I know a startup company lobotomizing Mac Mini's into gentoo boxes simply because the mac mini is by far the best small footprint machine (in cost, power consumption, and size) that it's worth it for them to do it.

For $4 more, you get a faster processor, 4 times the memory, more harddrive space, dual optical drives, SLI, and a 20" LCD. Apple has done a good job of making sure that they add a lot of mac only accessories (or gimmicks depending on your point of view) that make direct comparisons to a PC harder. Stuff like backlit keyboards with light sensors, integrated webcam, frontrow, firewire, small formfactor, etc.

While I agree that high end Apples are very expensive, you say that they are noisy. The G5 is one of the quietest towers I've ever seen. At my university we have a lab about half filled with G5s and half filled with some flavor of dell thing. The G5s are very quiet. I think the G4s were the last tower to be really loud, but I just replaced mine with a new iMac, and I've never heard so much as a peep out of it, even while playing some pretty beefy games or doing video encoding.

Depends on the benchmark used, as has been amply demonstrated, and I'll guess which way the ones in Apple stores will be slanted...bottom line is, every day the Intel competitors are getting faster and the G5s aren't, so it's about time they were retired.

was kinda screwed up:) i mean it looked like 7 different editors had gone through it and tried to put in their own views of what the new mac pro should be. and wound up stuck in an infinite loop of just rehashing the same issues.

there are better articles out there on the new mac pro. i just haven't had a chance to read them yet.

I use Quad G5 desktop.The problem is Applications. I keep monitoring Applications CPU usage, I see many of them use single CPU, mencoder like open source stuff uses single CPU while iDVD happily uses all 4 CPUs (360% CPU usage)

Legendary mac shareware uses single CPU while saving TIFF files. To use all CPUs you need professional applications and they are expensive.

So your argument is that non-pro software is not optimized to use expensive pro-level hardware? How is that news or important?

If your needs justify the expense of a Quad-core computer, then your needs also justify the expense of the professional software needed to drive it properly. After all, "professional" means that you are making money doing that.

Parallel Processing programing is different then normal program. You cant just make a program then compile it with SMP and have it magically work on all processors. You need to design the application to work on different number of processors figueing out what it can do at the same time verses one followed by the next. What a good SMP OS will do is try to keep all the processors balanced so the load is evenly spread. But Apps will not magically run SMP with standard coding without calling threads, forks, o

To be fair, Intel has talked about being able to tune their prefetch units in the different Core 2 families for the typical workloads. How much that amounts to is hard to tell, but when Woodcrest uses FB-DIMM, I guess that difference could warrant some additional tuning in the prefetch strategy. On the mobile end, it could be wise to adapt to the lower total bandwidth, to avoid saturating the bus. But, overall, you're very right - all of Intel's new offerings will quite soon be very similar.

It's too bad they aren't willing to look at the new AMD Opteron 4x4 and 8x8, mentioned recently. That would allow the system to keep the quad (and beyond) name and run cool and efficiently (compared to the Xeon).

I'm willing to hazard a guess on the nature of the redesigned enclosure.

Have you noticed how Apple likes a certain symmetry between applications (iTunes brushed aluminum, Safari brushed aluminum) and the Pro enclosure (G5 brushed aluminum)? Apple seems to be experimenting with a lighter, smooth metal theme as seen in the current Mail.app. I hereby conjecture that the new Pro Mac enclosure will likewise be a very light-colored, smooth metal with a similar look.

The only thing I disagree with is the death of the PowerPC remarks. I expect Apple to keep at least one G5 in its product line (e.g. the dual 2.3, perhaps a single CPU dual core 2.5) to support those needing fast PowerPC boxes until all key software, such as Adobe's product line, has migrated.

I don't think they'll use Xeons in the "Power Mac", but that's where all of the speculation is running, and I don't have the energy to argue with people about it (especially the retards who inhabit most forums- I'm looking at you, MacRumors).Whatever processor they go with, Apple will use the same motherboard for all models- which means either Xeons on the low end or no quad. I think Apple will go with Core 2 Duo and skip the four core model until January, which is when Intel's roadmap shows quad-core proc

The Xeon 5100 series chips are Core 2 (Conroe) based. These chips are code named Woodcrest and started shipping in June. See the page 2 of the article [arstechnica.com]. You must be thinking of the older Intel roadmap.

Having owned Macs going all the way back to the beginning this is the first time I have ever been faced with Apple coming out with weaker machines than they already are shipping. This whole Intel mess with Apple is enough to make me sick enough to my stomach that I am faced with the first in my life feeling of moving beyond Apple.

People like you - the PowerPC devotee - make me embarrassed to be a 20+year Mac user.

Wasn't your Quad worth the money you paid for it when you bought it? You do realize Apple has to keep revving it's product line, don't you?

Face it - Intel's latest offerings are a better than the 970FX, which is a several-year-old design. The Core 2 has longer legs than the G5 in any form.

Apple's done it's users a favor by moving to a faster, less expensive, more readily available microprocessor part. They've also done users a favor by producing an easily-portable OS and gracious backwards compatibility.

You may pine for the days when you could argue the vagaries of microarchitectures you don't understand on Slashdot, but some of us actually have work to do and look forward to faster, more productive machines - and don't mind paying a few extra dollars for Apple design and the Mac OS. We like the relative simplicity Apple has brought to the x86 platform and we'll enjoy using our faster machines while you moan about your "Four by four monster style" PowerPC.

As a 20 year Mac user myself, I want to agree with you except for one thing.I bought a Mac Mini specifically for FrontRow and specifically so I could stream my video collection from iTunes, and I have never been more embarrassed or dissatisfied with a piece of Apple hardware in a very very long time.

The *only* thing this machine is doing is running iTunes & FrontRow.

More often than not iTunes is pegged at 100% CPU that the entire machine becomes so unstable that I have to pull out the power cord because

I'd highly suggest returning the machine to Apple for repairs, there is clearly something wrong. Right this moment, I am encoding a 4 GB.MOV (MPEG-4 and AAC) to DVD Format with FFMpegX, have iTunes running on Shuffle playing my music, typing this from inside Camino, talking to friends on Adium and using X-Chat Aqua,Coreduotemp monitoring my CPU temp, and it is still running comfortably. Are you using the Core Solo or Duo? How much RAM is in it? I have the Core Duo Mini w/ 1 Gig of RAM. My Mom's 20" iMac Core Duo w/ 2 GB of RAM knocks the socks off of my old Powermac G4 1.4 GHz (upgraded with Mercury Extreme processor). Have you tried re-installing OS X? Trust me, it is not normal for your Mini to be acting like that. Yesterday, I had FFMpegX encoding another file and was using FrontRow to watch videos at the same time and it worked fine.

iTunes is fucking garbage and as soon as I find another player that does all the things that it does that I actually use, I'm going to can it. I actually use it on Windows because I really love the interface. I tried that open-source competitor, the one based on Mozilla; it was even crappier, slower, chunkier... But when it spins up I gleefully look forward to ditching iTunes.

Don't blame the Mini for iTunes' failings. The mini is a gutless, non-expandable, IO-poor unit, but it's more than capable of pla

Please don't comment about professional workstations, they have nothing to do with your consumer grade shareware applications or games.

I believe that there are more professional workstations using intel products than that of the G5. I would even venture a guess that there are more workstations running SPARC than either x86 or POWER, because of the age of the SPARC and scientists don't always upgrade their computers. At least that is what I have observed.

Where did I praise Intel? I'm just glad Apple is offering competitive boxes again.

I also see you pay $100 yearly to.Mac service and you claim the parent being "devotee".

I admit that.Mac isn't the best hosting/email/sotrage value in the world, but it is nicely integrated with the Mac OS, comes with some free spiffs every month, and is a tiny cost of doing business overall. I use it for it's ease of posting password-protected files

".. except that Cell is completely unsuitable for use as a desktop CPU.For games consoles with dedicated software? Perhaps.

For scientific computing and HPC? Sure."

Yes but that is only with the current core that IBM is using.The SPE could be tired to a full PPC core with out of order execution.To be honest unless you have programed the Cell I am not so sure that even those first three statements are facts. Until we see some machines that use the Cell it really is just one big maybe. Maybe IBM can work compil

Dear god, no. Yes, it has double precision, but it's only zomgwtffast in non IEEE-754 single precision. Holy rounding errors, Batman! Will there be obscenely fast LAPACK/fft/convolution benchmarks on the cell? Yes. Will those codes be usable for serious science? Not really.

It doesn't need to be a professional analyst to figure why IBM wouldn't , won't bother with Apple Inc.IBM sold their desktop/laptop business to China. They don't want to bother with end users one by one anymore.

IBM is not "hurt" by Apple giving up PowerPC, PowerPC is not "dead" because Apple gave it up. PowerPC 970 (G5) is only a single, feature cut model of PowerPC line.

As you guys worked at IBM and working at IBM does not care to tell these simple facts, we feel urge to say it. See there are people who th

It's not necessarily "bungling," either. Apple simply did not spend enough money with IBM for it to be worth it to IBM to spend R&D on Apple products. IBM can expect Microsoft to buy as many as 50 million XBox360 CPU's over the next five years. Sony may buy as many as 50 million Cell processors over the next five years.

How many G5's has Apple bought? Three million? There's no 3GHz G5 because Apple's orders would not cover IBM's investment in creating it.

Apple this mess didn't need to happen! Your bungling of the IBM relationship was your own fault!

Wow! So Steve Jobs managed to convince Ken Kutaragi, Satoru Iwata and Steve Ballmer to use PPC chips in their new consoles, thereby removing IBM's incentive to make PPCs for desktop computers and to make any kinds of improvements to their PPCs during the next five years since consoles don't need faster chips? Interesting!

You can disable it by clicking on "preferences" then "comments" and then checking "normal" instead of "U of M testing".You're only supposed to get it if you agreed to be a part of the survey and then went through a little tutorial on it. At least, that's how I got it. I guess slashdot just changed it for everyone now?

I've found the interface to be fairly buggy. It has some great potential, but sometimes the scripts freeze up and the sometimes show controls is there, sometimes it's not. I hope they work

I love my Albook but would love to buy a new Intel Mac. However I upgraded my PC for work and gaming so my computer spending is shut down for now.

I'll probably wait to see if Apple is going to use the Core 2 Duos in any of their machines (iMac, Mac Pro, etc) and wait for a second revision of those before making the plunge. By then I'll have more money saved up, more apps will be native/universal, and I'll have the new chip as well.